France Removes Transsexualism From Mental Illnesses List

With all the reports of the amount of homophobia that exists in France, it doesn’t tend to pop into your head when you think of what countries are being most progressive in terms of LGBT rights, however it currently is being just that as France has become the first country to remove transsexualism from it’s list of recognised mental illnesses.

Announced last year by the France’s Minister of Health, Roselyne Bachelot, the decision finally came into effect at the end of February, with a campaign also launched in the country, endorsed by some of France’s leading minds, petitioning the World Health Organisation to follow suit.

Currently in France, both gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatments are funded by the state, however if their new gender is to be recognised, the French authorities state that the full surgery must be completed, leaving any transsexual who does effectively sterilised.

The change to France’s law comes at the same time as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) begins considering changes for the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Seen as the main resource for diagnosing mental illnesses, the current version sees transgenderism referred to as “gender identity disorder”, with a working group on the subject now suggesting the word “disorder” is dropped and “gender incongruence” put in the place of  “Gender Identity Disorder in Adolescents or Adults” and “Gender Identity Disorder in Children”.

Backing this recommendation up by saying it was more appropriate

because “[it] is a descriptive term that better reflects the core of the problem: an incongruence between, on the one hand, what identity one experiences and/or expresses and, on the other hand, how one is expected to live based on one’s assigned gender (usually at birth)”.

the working group also pointed to results of a survey of organisations representing transgendered people carried out by the APA that found the term was widely rejected “because, in their view, it contributes to the stigmatisation of their condition”.

Via Star Observer (story) and ell brown (photo)